In the real Lite-Brite toy, if I recall correctly, there's a black construction paper sandwiched between the pegboard and the light box so that when you push a peg into one of the holes, the peg punctures the black paper allowing light to come through that peg.

Nice project.I always wanted to buy a few Nanoleaf kits, but they are prohibitively expensive and your solution is far more cost efficient. One thing I noticed, in your pictures of the lit hexagons, that there are 'hot spots' where the LEDs are located. I'm not sure if one would be able to notice that when looking at it directly. Seems that one would, especially when the brightness is turned down. Is there a way to mitigate the hot spots so that the light is spread evenly across the surface? Here's an idea, LCD screens that are edge-lit as most are, have a film that evenly disperses the light across the entire surface of the screen. Maybe that is something that could be exploited for this project. To reduce cost, find an electronics junk recycler and buy up a bunch of non-working monito...

Nice project.I always wanted to buy a few Nanoleaf kits, but they are prohibitively expensive and your solution is far more cost efficient. One thing I noticed, in your pictures of the lit hexagons, that there are 'hot spots' where the LEDs are located. I'm not sure if one would be able to notice that when looking at it directly. Seems that one would, especially when the brightness is turned down. Is there a way to mitigate the hot spots so that the light is spread evenly across the surface? Here's an idea, LCD screens that are edge-lit as most are, have a film that evenly disperses the light across the entire surface of the screen. Maybe that is something that could be exploited for this project. To reduce cost, find an electronics junk recycler and buy up a bunch of non-working monitors to harvest the special film. Then the film can be cut to shape and applied to the interior of the hexagons.

Very nice! You can actually do some science with your project.Check out publiclab.org and spectralworkbench.org. They have a spectrometer of similar design to yours, but their's is made of folded paper and is very flimsy, that is, very easy to damage. While yours is very robust as it can take some beating in the field compared to public lab's. In spectralworkbench.org, there's a web app (and python stand-alone one as well) that can process the spectrum you photograph for analysis. Not only can you tell composition of glowing gasses, such as neon, argon, xenon, sun, etc, but you can also analyze non-gaseous materials by analyzing the reflected or transmitted light from the material. You can do some really cool nerdy sciency stuff with it.I voted for your project.

Very cool. The first thought that came to my mind when I saw the pic of the finished product is that it it's a giant Alexa! All it needs is some buttons and the LED ring to complete the illusion. It can even have some decent speakers in it and have an actual Alexa unit (Echo dot) embedded to give it full functionality. Gears are turning.

Very clever functional art piece! You should be very proud of your work.Has anyone commissioned you to build another one? You can easily charge triple your cost as it is very unique how the time words are presented. Well done.

Nice Nixie work-alike concept, but if you know Nixies, you know that they are nearly never any color than red-orange. I would have liked to have seen a pic of it, glowing orange, and be momentarily confused about whether it's a true-nixie or not. To me, that moment of confusion is what I would call an effective Faux. That said, your project is wonderfully designed and constructed and it shows you spent much effort and dedication to it.

Very clever. I can see it being used in a post-apocalyptic world where trading would be done with no-longer-manufactured objects and coin-money would only amount to semi-accurate weights.As a thought experiment, I wonder what the limits would be with a larger glueless cardboard scale, that is, what is the heaviest object it could theoretically weigh before the scale's cardboard structure collapses.

Very nice project. I'm going to give it a go and adapt it to my printer, but I'm going to try not to remove the print head. Might be too tricky.I have used the sharpie method to draw resist on a board by hand and found that sometimes etchant leaches under the resist where some simple lines were drawn. I was wondering: Have you tried drawing with a pen at low speed with tighter fill patterns for laying down thicker resist thus avoiding etchant leaching? I don't mean laying resist on top of resist which only serves to dissolve the first resist layer, but rather laying down a tight pattern on the first go, e.g., drawing a line as a narrow box and filling it in rather than drawing a line with one or two line-drawing passes. The ideal might be wrong thinking, but it plays out very well in ...

Very nice project. I'm going to give it a go and adapt it to my printer, but I'm going to try not to remove the print head. Might be too tricky.I have used the sharpie method to draw resist on a board by hand and found that sometimes etchant leaches under the resist where some simple lines were drawn. I was wondering: Have you tried drawing with a pen at low speed with tighter fill patterns for laying down thicker resist thus avoiding etchant leaching? I don't mean laying resist on top of resist which only serves to dissolve the first resist layer, but rather laying down a tight pattern on the first go, e.g., drawing a line as a narrow box and filling it in rather than drawing a line with one or two line-drawing passes. The ideal might be wrong thinking, but it plays out very well in my head. ;-)I have also found, with the manual drawing method, that a clean copper is a happy copper lad...uhm...clad. ;-) The cleaner copper surface will accept the resist better and also avoid etchant leaching to some extent. Once the copper clad is clean, don't touch it with ungloved hands to avoid depositing grease on the copper undoing your efforts.

Awesome project, results and documentation!! You must be an electromechanical engineer or engineering tech. Great job!Now make one about 4 km long to launch something into space! I'll ask Elon Musk to fund it for you! ;-) (it's cheap to dream)

Nice project and looks like a prosumer factory-built photography tool. I've been looking for an easy inexpensive camera slider solution and you just made one. Well done!!Just one minor issue: the link you posted for the wheels is exactly the same as the one for aluminum profiles.Thanks for putting this instructable out. It's fun--isn't it?

I love the lamp. It looks fantastic and unique--haven't seen that anywhere else. I fantasize what that would look like with an exhaust plume animation using individually-addressable RGB LEDs added for two modes: lamp mode and animation mode.

Beautifully interesting!I'm very interested in buying the kit if or when it becomes available. Having some commercial service laser-cut it for me is prohibitively expensive. I would rather buy the bits from Durss.

Beautifully interesting!I'm very interested in buying the kit when or if it becomes available. Having a commercial service laser-cut it for me is prohibitively expensive. I would rather buy the cut bits from you, Durss.

I've used the big guns too, but never in someone else's rental property and very very sparingly as I resist having to tear into walls and/or floors to replace eaten-through pipes. I understand where you're coming from, tho, because Drano doesn't do a good job unclogging all the money I poured into the drain to buy that stuff. Vinegar and baking soda are much cheaper.

What is the time ratio between the vinegar/baking soda solution and Drano, that is, how much time should we give the vinegar/baking soda application to do its job?